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Spinal cord lesions
Published in Ibrahim Natalwala, Ammar Natalwala, E Glucksman, MCQs in Neurology and Neurosurgery for Medical Students, 2022
Ibrahim Natalwala, Ammar Natalwala, E Glucksman
v – Tabes dorsalis occurs because of the degeneration of dorsal columns and is seen in tertiary syphilis. As a result, impaired proprioception and locomotor ataxia are evident in these patients. Other symptoms and findings associated with tabes dorsalis include Argyll Robertson pupils (reactive to accommodation but not to light), a positive Romberg’s sign and sensory ataxia at night.
The Treatment of the Special Forms of Mental Disease
Published in Francis X. Dercum, Rest, Suggestion, 2019
Personally, I have used the Swift-Ellis method in a large number of patients, many of them relatively early cases; at times with a favorable result as to both symptoms and progress. In some cases, a remission of longer or shorter duration was established and In a Jew instances remissions or improvements of such long duration that, perhaps, they can be regarded as arrested cases. I am not, however, by any means so sanguine as are others as to the efficacy of this treatment in paresis. On the other hand, in locomotor ataxia, it has in my experience led to results often surprising in the degree of the improvement, in the disappearance of the pains and in the lessening of the ataxia. Some of these doubtless deserve to de regarded as arrested cases; but the future only will tell.
Summary and Development of a New Approach to Senescence
Published in Nate F. Cardarelli, The Thymus in Health and Senescence, 2019
Finally, I wish to mention kuru, a disease limited to a distinct foci in New Guinea. Clinical manifestation is a progressive locomotor ataxia that leads to paralysis, muscle wasting, and death. The survival span between onset and death is usually 3 to 6 months. However, remissions are seen with pregnancy and childbirth. The cause has yet to be found. Gajdusek and Zigas performed 29 autopsies on victims.238 No lesions were found in any organ, blood chemistry was normal, and no nutritional deficiency or infective process was observed. Antibiotic therapy was useless. Anisotropic bodies resembling senile plaque were found in the brain. Although reports on this malady which I have seen do not mention it, perhaps kuru is a progeroid type of disease with bioclock implications. Recent articles tend to the belief that a slow virus is the causative agent, transmitted by ritual cannibalism. No virus has yet been isolated.
The concepts of heredity and degeneration in the work of Jean-Martin Charcot
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2020
From mental diseases, Féré extended the study of heredity and degeneration to neurological and neuromuscular diseases: for example, tics, functional spasms (neuropathic torticollis, writer’s cramp, i.e., dystonia), shaking, migraine, epilepsy and neurasthenia, and Friedreich’s ataxia. He adopted a view of locomotor ataxia that was identical to Charcot’s. As for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple sclerosis, he doubted they were hereditary. The final chapters of the 1894 version of his book covered “the teratological stigmata of degeneration.” The “objective signs of degeneration” were as significant as heredity, and the moral and physical causes had the same implication. He also explained: “The traits that are the stigmata of degeneration have characteristics that do not belong to the race and that, passed down in the family in which they have appeared, tend to function in the same way as an accident and remove the family from the race” (317). As examples, he cited variations in skull size and shape, various unusual hair implantations, ear lobe deformations, dental implantation disorders, pectus excavatum, lumbar pilosity, and so forth. It may be relevant here that after the defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, people in France were haunted by the fear that the decadence of the “French race” would make it impossible to take revenge. Degeneration and decadence were part of the same ideology. Féré did not refer to any of the work by his contemporary botanists, naturalists, or biologists, even though they could have pruned back his theory of disease transmission. During his Tuesday Lessons, Charcot cited Féré’s book multiple times, always with effusive praise, until it was no longer clear who was the teacher and who was the student.
The early history of the knee-jerk reflex in neurology
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2022
As a result of this broader awareness, McCartie (1895) attempted to move the purview of ataxia away from the lower spinal cord and attempted to broaden the symptom of ataxia beyond locomotor ataxia. To him, ataxia was a symptom, like paralysis, and should not be isolated to the lower extremities as in locomotor ataxia. It occurs in the incoordination of eye muscles as in nystagmus and in the incoordination of the tongue and laryngeal muscles in speech impairment. Ataxia occurs along with paralysis. Syphilis caused 80% of the cases of ataxia (McCartie 1895; Vein 2007). It was illogical for it to cause only localized degeneration of certain tracts.